


To the Spoiler Belongs the Victory

by millernumber1



Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics), Robin (Comics)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-20 08:57:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3644340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millernumber1/pseuds/millernumber1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In her introductory story (Detective Comics 647-649), Stephanie Brown, then going by the alias "Spoiler," says, "To the Spoiler belongs the victory."  Inspired by tumblr user theblondebat and their systematic posting of the comic panels Steph appears in from the beginning to the end of the pre-new 52 continuity, this will be a series of short ficlets exploring Steph's history, both pre- and post-reboot.  There will also be some interspersed bits based on fanart that I found particularly evocative.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. No matter how good his intentions...

**Author's Note:**

> http://theblondebat.tumblr.com/post/114243829464/detective-comics-647
> 
> Steph's first appearance, in Detective Comics 647, in 1992, written by Chuck Dixon, art by Tom Lyle and Scott Hanna.

Bob was closing the gas station when he heard the bell above the door ring. He sighed, but smiled as the young woman slipped through the door. He recognized her from earlier - she'd bought a bag of chips, and he'd thought she looked so sad despite her trim appearance and striking purple jeans that she'd stayed in his mind.

"Um, do you have drums of paint that are suitable for aerosol use?" she asked hesitantly.

"We sure do! What color are you looking for?" he said, wondering a bit at the odd request.

"Red would be great."

As he brought the drums out and rang them up, he heard the rerun of the news start, a sign that he'd really been open too long. But the girl still seemed sad, distractedly twirling her blond hair around her finger as the mayoral candidate ranted about that vigilante again.

"Gotham is drowning in a cesspool of crime. The police are underfunded, poorly trained and unmotivated. It's this city's shame that a phenomenon like the Batman has arisen. It's not up to some masked vigilante to protect our citizens, no matter how good his intentions..." Bob tuned it out. He'd heard it all before from various politicians - "The Batman is bad, the Batman inspires kids to endanger their lives, the Batman creates his own foes," natter natter natter. His own view was fairly live and let live, but he approved of someone who would spend his life making other people's lives safer at the risk of his own. Or her own - he rememberd that Batgirl a year or so ago. Absently, he wondered what happened to her - she seemed to vanish completely, while her male counterparts continued to patrol and stir up trouble.

"Do you need a sprayer system?" he inquired after giving the girl the total for her order.

She shook her head. "I've got an old one my...father used a few years ago." She seemed unusually hesitant about revealing this fact, and he wondered if the sad look in her eyes connected to the aforementioned parent. None of his business, though. But she was an awfully nice girl, he thought as the bell rang again behind her.


	2. More Ambitious

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> http://theblondebat.tumblr.com/post/114262061069/detective-comics-647
> 
> Eavesdropping, Spoiler style.

The wind blew her cape over the skylight, and Steph nervously crouched lower while still aiming her listening antenna at her father and his criminal cronies below. The fabric of her head mask sucked in and out with her breathing - it had not been easy climbing up to perch higher than the abandoned auto parts warehouse, and she was still trying to catch her breath. Fortunately, part of her reveled in the danger - the chance to feel alive again after so many years of her father scheming in and out of prison and her mother attempting to forget with various pills.

"This one is more ambitious, more complicated," her father boasts, his blonde ponytail, so like her own, swishing as he struts about and leans on tables. Bragging about how he's cured of leaving clues at his crime scenes. Well, Steph thought, we'll just have to see about that. You're not the only one who can be ambitious.


	3. Tribunal of Birds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> http://ibmiller.tumblr.com/post/114734492944/birdstump-stephanie-brown-by-%E9%99%8C%E6%A1%91-wow-very
> 
> Set in the aftermath of War Games, and before War Crimes kicks in.

Her left shoulder still aches. Funny. Even though it's the right arm in a sling - fractures apparently warrent more immobilization than a gunshot wound, the burning sting remains highest on her list. Perhaps because it's the one she most could have prevented.

No. Dr. Thompkins told her to stop obsessing over guilt and responsibility. If any kind of new life could be forged from this mess (mess she caused, people she killed, no, no), any kind of new life, it must be done with a clean slate. Hopefully, maybe she'll come to a place when the bad memories feel like someone else's life, someone else's mistakes. Someday.

Africa is far away. Maybe, just maybe, far enough to make that happen.

Steph fights the urge to smooth her purple skirt over her bandaged leg, since one arm is immobilized, and the other holds her (surprisingly light - funny how being declared dead seems to make possessions unnecessary) suitcase. Probably would hurt more anyway. Her mind shies away from the memories of that hurt.

Desperately looking to find something to distract her, she sees what she came here to find - the stone with her name on it. A bird is pecking at something on top of it. Curiously, Steph peers closer at the bird. At first, it seems black as night - possibly a crow? But it seems too small, and when it turns towards her, she sees the brilliant flash of red.

A robin.

_"Was any of it real? Was I ever really Robin?"_

_"Of course you were."_

Those four words.  Even the voice disguiser can't hide the tears in Bruce's voice.  She wonders, and probably always will, whether he really, truly meant it.  He's Batman, after all - there's usually at least four reasons for everything he does. She doesn't doubt that manipulating Tim figured heavily in her own glorious, heartbreaking weeks as Robin. But...Bruce might keep things hidden, but he rarely lies.

"Part of the legend," she quotes herself - no doubt what Bruce thought were her dying words.  Steph hopes she can correct his belief - but not yet. Dr. Thompkins is adamant that Batman's recruiting of young people needs to stop, that faking her death is necessary for giving her the space she needs to heal, and hopefully deter others from being tortured by madmen like the Joker and Black Mask.

She can't bring herself to tell Leslie that Bruce had fired her after trying to train her.

The robin whistles cheerily.  Shifting her burden so that the suitcase doesn't jostle her bandaged leg, Steph turns away.

A long road lies ahead. Maybe one day she'll travel it in the other direction, back to this city that has taken so much from her.  For now, she hopes that this quiet memory, a bird and a rock, will be the last she sees of it for a long, long time.


	4. Casualty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steph's death didn't really have a lot of follow through. But a few writers, including Judd Winick and Grant Morrison, did remember that Steph had died. Inspired by hradzka's fic "Jason and Me" and the first issue of "Under the Hood" but Winick.

"And death has visited this house once again. He talks of another lost soldier. He talks of battlefields. He talks of a war. He does not allow himself to see it for what it is. A loss of someone he cares for. Another blow to an already very battered heart."

"Who are you talking to, Alfred?" The voice is quiet, lacking the usual electronic distortion to hide Miss Gordon's identity as Oracle. Sometimes, I forget that she keeps tabs on all of us. I once visited her in the clocktower (freshly rubble, like our lives), and when she wasn't putting out fires, she would cycle through screens and audio for every member of the family, carefully checking to see that we're all well. She rarely comments. Sometimes, I think Miss Gordon has learned her lesson from Master Bruce a bit too well. But these words, calm but ever so slightly warm with concern, remind me that her intellect only distracts her from her deep-seated compassion - it never overwhelms it.

"No one." She knows, of course. I do not have her memory, so I sometimes keep an electronic journal - purged at the end of the day, of course - to help me remember truly important but unrecordable things about this life.

"He hasn't put up a memorial." It isn't a question. Miss Gordon's memorial, next to Master Todd's, is dusted by my own hands every day. I'm not sure whether I could face another, though God knows she richly deserves it. I imagine setting it up. Putting together the dressmaker's dummy, and carefully putting the togs onto it. A stray hair - Miss...Robin's hair had always been a trouble to her during her few months here. The material was different enough from her original uniform that it seemed to keep her in a constant state of static, golden mane twice its normal volume and flowing behind her as she laughed...

I don't know.

"I am not indifferent to you." I'd told her that. She'd been asking all of her peers, mentors, and friends if she was like Master Todd. She was so perceptive. She knew I didn't think she should be Robin. To ease the sting, since I knew that above all else, Robin craved affirmation that she'd never gotten from her family, I let her know that I didn't think Master Todd should have been Robin as well. She'd smiled at that. She always had a heartbreakingly lovely smile. Just like Jason. There was a recklessness about it - a sense that joy was dangerous, that even though they'd been hurt by trusting before, they were going to continue.

Not indifferent. She deserved to know that I'd watched her for years. Since Master Drake told me that a lump he was nursing was the handiwork of a blonde crimefighter about his own age. Since she'd overcome both her father and the natural but terrible rage that his constant betrayals had left her. Since that father's last betrayal became his death.

I hoped her perception had let her know that there was more than simple fondness in my care for her.

I know Master Bruce has banished Leslie for withholding care that could have saved her life. He says that it absolves him of blame, since he was able to get her to help in time to save her life. He even said that she tried to make him promise not to hold any injury she incurred in the field against himself.

He never promised, of course.

Sometimes, I think about Leslie, and how incomprehensible her actions seem. I can't imagine...how was it possible?

I will always regret not defending Robin...Miss Brown's mettle to Master Bruce when he fired her. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she wasn't cut out for this. But I can't help remembering her first time in action after giving birth to the child she so bravely gave up for adoption. She took out serious villains with the same dedication she'd shown in preparing for childbirth - with enthusiasm, determination, and skill. Master Bruce himself had said she could be Tim's equal - and then withheld the training to make that dream a reality, even when she was official Tim's replacement.

Replacement? She could never be a replacement. She was her own person, her own hero.

And I told her I was not indifferent to her.

No. I wasn't.


	5. Save Her

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leslie, I was just trying to help.

A morgue. He's turned my hospital into a morgue.

I told Batgirl that. She doesn't deserve it - she's almost as hard as he is, but she's almost a child. She's not responsible for the kind of death this man has caused tonight.

And he has the gall to bring a child - clearly wearing a uniform he paid for - and demand that I save her?

Contusions - on her head, clearly causing unconsciousness - on the rest of her body - much of it in defensive places, marking the signs of battle after battle tonight. But combined with the lacerations and punctures - this girl was...

Twisted holes. Glass fragments in her shoulder. A bullet wound in the upper arm - through and through, clearly aimed for maximum pain without fatality. Broken ribs. Burns.

Someday, the man who did this will have his head blown off. And I won't weep. I've wept at the graves of murderers. But someone who does this. Not one tear.

The girl is unconscious at first, but then her eyelashes flutter.

"Batman?" she asks, her voice full of pain and longing.

Even through the permanent black-red lenses that shade my sight tonight, I had seen the sorrow in Batman as he brought her in. He feels guilty, and...he does care for this girl.

No. He cannot. If he truly cared, he would have kept her away from the unspeakable horror she's faced tonight.

"He's not here," I respond.

"I was...only trying...to help." The words are almost inaudible, her breathing is so labored.

Six words. Such a short amount of time, and yet it changes my entire life.

I will save this girl. I will save her from herself. I will save her from the monster I used to believe in.

My hospital is a morgue. The red I see through grows stronger when I find an entry that meets my needs after only three tries.

Not for a moment do I think of withholding her care. But I can make sure that a "great detective" will think I did, after laying enough of a trail.

You see, it's not enough to know that this girl will be safe tomorrow. I must make his so angry that he won't see her at all - that she will be safe for the rest of her life.

Even if she will have to live it somewhere else.

I'm done. No more will I live in a morgue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was inspired upon rereading War Games. Though Leslie's "withholding treatment" and Steph's death have both been retconned, the person responsible for getting rid of them - Chuck Dixon - was fired immediately after writing the initial events, and wasn't allowed to show these kinds of moments that give a retcon more plausibility.
> 
> Also, War Games was a good idea that went dreadfully wrong around the time when they decided that Steph's death was the most important thing ever. And I will forever love Catwoman 52 for the one panel where Black Mask's head is blown off. I don't usually root for death, but Black Mask will forever be on my list of "needs to die yesterday" characters for what he did during War Games.

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go!


End file.
